Gotham is still recovering from the devastating plague from Contagion, when a catastrophic earthquake suddenly hits the city. Cataclysm follows the heroes of the Bat-family as they try to save a city that may not be able to be saved.
My original plan for this weekend was to start the No Man's Land story, but I realized that I should do this right and start at the beginning. Of course, if I was really doing this right, I'd have started with Contagion, but I have to wait for that one to arrive via interlibrary loan (I'll review it later this summer!).
I enjoyed Cataclysm a lot more than I expected, partly because the book doesn't focus exclusively on Batman. In fact, Batman is missing for large chunks of the story, to the extent that the other characters wonder if he's alive or dead. The storytelling was really well-done here: many issues contained several small, three-to-five page stories told from the victims' point of view. So we get the story as seen by the mother trapped under a car with her son, or the family caught in the basement of their building while it slowly floods from a broken water main. And while most of those stories end with Nightwing or Batman rescuing the narrators, there is a surprisingly large number of civilian deaths in this collection. Which adds to the realism, if nothing else. The few appearances from Batman's Rogue's Gallery are brief--enough to hint at things to come, but not enough to take the spotlight off the real devastation. (Some favorite appearances include a wonderfully amoral voice-over from Ra's al Ghul which just begs to be read aloud, and a three-page mini-story showing the Penguin choosing who to save--only those whose skills he thinks he can use. On the non-villain side of things, I also had a lot of fun with the encounter between Harvey Bullock and Anarky at the start of the book).
That said, this is still a Batman story, and so it needs a main villain. That villain is an opportunist going by "Quakemaster" who takes quickly claims responsibility for the quake and threatens to cause another if his demands are not met. No one knows whether he's bluffing or actually capable of causing another earthquake, so on top of saving the millions of people who are trapped or injured, and stopping the gangs of looters roving the streets, Batman & Co. also have to track down and stop this guy before he can cause more panic.
As with most cross-over events, the art her varies widely as we jump from title to title, as did the writing. I got another glimpse of Stephanie Brown in the Spoiler story included here, and I continue to be unimpressed by her as a character. I know that this story has to occur before the War Games series, but I wonder how closely they follow one another. Because I find it hard to believe that Batman, the man who came up with what-if scenarios and game plans for every possible catastrophe that could happen in Gotham didn't have a plan for this. Especially since we learn in the first act that Bruce Wayne has been expecting the quake to hit for some time, and has even gone so far as to hire a seismologist to monitor the fault lines near Gotham. He'd even retroactively earthquake-proofed all Wayne Inc.-owned buildings on Gotham (with the exception of Wayne Manor, because he didn't want a work crew finding about that whole Bat-Cave situation. Oops).
Now, on to No Man's Land.
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